Plan to End World Hunger? Really? I'm all ears! No, actually I'm sadly skeptical, and the predictably conventional efforts of the two lovely ladies just leave me sad.
Earth Angels: Claire Courtin-Clarins, the French artist who has captivated the fashion set, and Lauren Bush Lauren, the philanthropic trailblazer, have formed a charitable—and highly glamorous—alliance"
The core of their efforts appears to be generating funds for the "United Nations World Food Programme" -- a tired exercise in killing the patient by treating the sympton while ignoring the disease.
The program excitedly reports how much food it ships to hungry people every year, never noting that the people it feeds are still hungry the next day. And the next. You don't end world hunger with free food -- free food that drives local producers out of business, because who can compete with free? Free food that empowers the despots who control its distribution and use it to reward supporters and punish enemies.
Those lovely ladies, glamorously pictured throughout the article, are throwing money toward one of the most insidious perpetuators of hunger and evil on the planet.
But they have the best of intentions, so I guess that makes it all better.
Did they never think to wonder what it is about their lives that makes them different than the hungry people they "feed?" It's the gobs and gobs of money. No, seriously. These young ladies are the beneficiaries of generations of successful capitalism -- good business decisions, hard work, making things that people want and selling them. But they are so many generations removed from the original hardscrabble entrepreneurialism responsible for their fabulous wealth that I don't think they understand its importance.
Those people don't need more hand-outs. They need commerce.
Unfortunately, many of the countries that receive extensive U.N. "aid" have been so devastated by the decades of free handouts and the corruption involved in competing for them that there is almost nothing left in the way of free market economies. Only painfully weaning those countries from aid, replacing it with meaningful work for meaningful pay, can save them. I don't pretend to know how to do that without millions of people starving. That's the "plan to end world hunger" I want to hear about. It wasn't forthcoming in that article.
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